In 1999, the Islamic Republic of Iran established elected local government by holding nationwide elections for city and village councils. Competing actors hoped it would support distinct outcomes: Islamization, administrative efficiency, and democratization. This chapter describes the underlying logic of these motivations and their outcomes over the two decades since: in the main, the triumph of Islamization and technocracy. It explores the regime’s use of local government and administrative law to undercut the democratizing potential of political decentralization through two arenas of local politics. The regime controlled the scope of local political participation through widespread disqualification of opposition individuals and political parties. The regime also severely restricted the autonomy of elected local government in passing legislation. This institutionalized elected local government as a subordinate administrative tier of the regime rather than a local partner in subnational governance. The chapter concludes that political decentralization in Iran is best interpreted through the theory of electoral authoritarianism and is best viewed historically as an integral part of building Iran’s authoritarian Islamic state.

After the war with Iraq (1980–1988), Iran had to reconstruct the economy and the government’s public management systems to address mounting challenges of urban poverty, low economic growth, and poor local management, which had led to significant urban unrest in several cities. The technocratic response of the Rafsanjani administration (1989–1997) included tentative steps to decentralize some central government functions to municipalities and a mandate for them to become financially self-sufficient. The technocrats supported decentralization for instrumental or pragmatic reasons of increasing the efficiency of local administration, not for empowering local democracy. I interpret the tensions between the competing imperatives of the Iranian decision to decentralize by distinguishing two ways a state can be strong, or between what I call good and bad centralization. In so doing, I draw on the distinction of two types of power introduced by Michael Mann, “infrastructural” power – the power of states to achieve collective purposes – and “despotic” power – the capacity of government to exert power over society and individuals. While both authoritarian and democratic states seek to augment the former, authoritarian states depend on strengthening the latter. By their indifference to the goal of checking despotic power, the technocratic endorsement of decentralization worked against democratization and dovetailed with the velayi goal of augmenting both forms of power together toward the goal of Islamizing society and state. At the same time, the failure to promote local economic development through decentralization must be considered a failure of the technocratic agenda.

For the last half century, theory in political sociology has been dominated at different times by materialist or idealist approaches. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, political economy and conflict theories seemed to prevail, led by Marxist theories but followed by other forms of conflict theories, such as resource mobilization and power resources theory. At this time, political economy approaches tried to bend culture into the class conflict process (see item 1 in Figure 8.1 with the dark circle representing political economy). For instance, gender and race issues were often filtered through class conflict lenses.